Other possible killers were a pedophile gang, while Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), insisted they were ritual murders carried out by white Satanists.31 The most interesting and revealing suggestion, however, came from comedian-activist Dick Gregory, who thought that Atlanta might be an “experiment.”
During a televised interview with the Detroit Black Journal in 1981, Gregory stated that sources told him that the victims were strangely mutilated; nine of seventeen bodies had “the tip of their penises . . . missing” and “hypodermic marks on their testicles,” while the remaining eight boys were too decomposed to determine if they had been similarly maimed. Gregory, however, claimed that the bodies did not match the missing children, which led him to think that they were alive in a laboratory where scientists were gathering white blood cells from the boys’ penises to produce the cancer-fighting drug interferon. Their motive might not be racist in the ordinary sense, but a result of some useful quality present in sickle cell blood. Therefore:
The “Atlanta Child Murders” were a blind with substitute corpses identified as the victims of a nonexistent serial killer to conceal the experiments. Dick Gregory did not call it a conspiracy and cover-up, but felt that the CIA, FBI, National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and Emory Hospital should not be excluded from the investigation.32
In James Baldwin’s book-length meditation on the murders, he writes that
[p]eople found this an appalling suggestion. I did not. I wondered why they did. It was during my lifetime, after all, and in my country, somewhere in a prison in the “American” South, that Black men with syphilis were allowed to die, while being scrutinized.33
Though Baldwin considers the “suggestion” plausible in light of the Tuskegee syphilis study, Gregory is describing the murders in terms of night doctors. Unlike Innis’s satanists, the “fiendish experiment” hypothesis is based on a widespread tradition, and similar ideas might have enjoyed greater currency than was acknowledged publicly. (Suspicions about white institutions are so deeply rooted that a 1990 poll conducted by the New York Times/WCBS-TV News found that “10% of Black Americans thought that the AIDS virus had been created in a laboratory in order to infect Black people. Another 20% believed that it could be true.”34) In addition to being consistent with existing beliefs, Gregory’s ideas also provide a measure of perverse reassurance. Instead of dark, incomprehensible forces at work within the black community, the source of danger is external and has familiar motives: white society’s agencies and institutions were once again exploiting black people by taking their blood and using it to make medicine to heal whites.
If rumors about Atlanta involving Klansmen/night doctors and children being abducted in vans were circulating through the black community nationwide, they could have provided the basis for the clowns. When the panics were going on, many assumed that the two were related (Pittsburgh police thought it was “some sort of hysteria perhaps related to child slayings in Atlanta . . . ,” but how close a connection existed was not then apparent.35 Perhaps the unexpected, and seemingly absurd, involvement of clowns proved distracting, and some kind of explanation, however speculative, seems warranted.
Kkklowns
John Wayne Gacy is one possibility. A respectable Chicago contractor, Gacy was a Jaycees Man of the Year who participated in local politics and entertained at charity events dressed as clowns named “Pogo” or “Patches.” In December 1978, police discovered that Gacy had also raped, tortured, and murdered more than thirty young men and adolescent boys, burying most of the bodies in a crawl space beneath his suburban ranch house and filling it with the smell of rotting flesh.
Gacy seems like the obvious inspiration for the panic. He was dubbed the “Killer Clown” and the murders received extensive coverage from 1979 to 1980. Gacy was a sexual sadist whose victims were often minors; he owned a black van, and widely reproduced photographs of Pogo and Patches radiate palpable depravity. Nevertheless, his role is probably a secondary, if surprising one (see the following discussion).
Another popular candidate is the shape-shifting, child-eating villain of Stephen King’s horror novel It, “Pennywise the Dancing Clown.” While Pennywise and John Wayne Gacy certainly launched a generation of coulrophobes, King’s book did not come out until 1986, and the television dramatization four years after that. Perhaps the explanation does not lie in one clown figure or another but in an accident of language.36
The words Klan and clown are similar (clown also sounds like KKK jargon names such as Kludd, Kloran, and Kleagle), and if black communities around the country were discussing the murders as the work of Klansmen driving vans, perhaps children interpreted Klan as clown. None of the 1981 panics happened in the South, where the KKK was active (few, if any, clown panics have been recorded there), which suggests that clowns-in-vans were created to fill the void somewhere that fear of the Klan existed but the Klan did not. That kind of situation could conceivably arise when a Southern black population relocates to somewhere like Newark, New Jersey.
Birth of a Notion
If a birthplace for clowns-in-vans exists, then Newark might be where it happened. The city’s port and factories attracted black workers from “Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida” at the beginning of the twentieth century and, despite the opening of a Klan headquarters on Broad Street in 1921, immigrants from the South kept coming until a majority of residents were black.37 In 1978, the city also experienced mysterious disappearances.
On August 20, 1978, five adolescent boys, ages sixteen and seventeen, were playing basketball together when they were hired to move boxes. After the job was finished, the five were dropped off at Clinton Avenue, then vanished. Despite years of investigation, and the chief suspect’s trial and acquittal in 2011, what happened to them remains unknown. Newark’s main disappearance happened eleven months before Atlanta’s, and while there is no proof that it inspired rumors about night doctors at work in New Jersey, the earliest report of clowns-in-vans discovered so far comes from Newark during Halloween, 1980.38
Earlier this week, rumors spread throughout Newark, N.J., that a trio disguised as two clowns and a witch were jumping out of a black van and attacking youngsters. The story was that children had been pricked with a needle, kidnapped and harassed. One report had it that witches were jumping out of vans and threatening to turn all the children into frogs.
Newark police said the hysteria may have been related to the mysterious slayings of the children in Atlanta.39
The reference to children being “pricked with a needle” appears in no other clown reports and recalls the night doctors’ syringes (“Soon as they catch you alone, they’d stick a needle in you that numbs you”) and the “hypodermic marks” that Dick Gregory said were on the Atlanta victims’ testicles. It also suggests that the story was in a transitional state, a sort of Archaeopteryx, displaying traits of both traditional Klan/night doctors and the emerging clowns.40
Untethered from their KKK/night doctor origins, clowns ceased to menace the children of a specific community and threatened children in general, making it possible for the story to spread into the larger society and then around the world.
After the nationwide flaps of 1981, reports of clowns-in-vans, or on foot, continued. A partial list of places includes Boston in 1983; Phoenix, Arizona, in 1985; Chicago, Newark, and surrounding cities in 1991; and Sydney and St. Albans, Australia. Clowns were seen in Washington, D.C., and Capitol Heights, Maryland, in 1994, while Latin America experienced prolonged panics.
Clowns have allegedly abducted countless children from Mexico, South America, and Central America for illegal adoption, organ harvesting, or the sex trade; by 1995, it reached the point where “more than 60 clowns” at Tegucigalpa, Honduras, “burned their costumes in a downtown park to protest the kidnapping of children by armed men dressed as clowns.”41
In the United States, clowns
also appeared in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in 2000, then returned to Chicago in 2008, and outbreaks still occur from time to time.
The witches, superheroes, and other costumed figures—whose many shapes suggest an unsettled aspect of the phenomenon—have disappeared, while different forms have evolved from the original clowns-in-vans. While some are simple variations, such as black clowns, and others that are nearly unrecognizable, like the “Puppet Man” of New South Wales, Australia, who drove a van filled with life-sized animal puppets and attacked two women. The clown’s descendants may even include London’s “Chelsea Smilers,” who were
a group of Chelsea football fans traveling London in a van with a smiley face painted on the side. They would stop schoolchildren and ask them questions about Chelsea football club. If the children got the questions wrong—perhaps they didn’t support Chelsea or, worse, didn’t like football—the gang would slice the corners of their mouth . . . then hit the child hard enough to make them scream, which widened their wounds into a “smile.”42
The combination of van, child victims, and exaggerated bloody “smiles” points to its possible origin.
Two different traditions of violent white-faced men in outlandish costumes apparently contributed to the clowns-in-vans phenomenon: the Klan/night doctors and clowns, the comic performers (they are complicated figures in their own right, with antecedents that include pagan wild men and medieval demons). This combination of elements apparently acquired a degree of reality during the clown flap.
Grim Rippers
On May 23, 1981, while clowns-in-vans were panicking children in Kansas City, a twenty-eight-year-old woman was abducted from Elmhurst, Illinois, near Chicago, and killed. She was the first of more than a dozen women murdered by the “Chicago Rippers” or “Ripper Crew,” a team of four young serial killers—Robin Gecht, the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, and Edward Spreitzer.
They drove around Chicago and neighboring cities in a red van, grabbing women off the street and subjecting them to rape, torture, and murder. The Rippers also amputated one or both of the victims’ breasts and allegedly ate them during satanic rituals. They were finally arrested in November 1982—but why discuss the Ripper crimes here?
There are parallels between the Chicago murders and clowns-in-vans, including when they began, how they were committed, and diabolical elements, but what is less apparent are the killers’ personal connections to clowns. Robin Gecht was a former employee of “Pogo” himself, John Wayne Gacy, whose 1979 confession implicated Gecht in several murders. Gacy also befriended Andrew Kokoraleis on death row at the Menard Correctional Center.43 He called the younger man “Koko,” which is a predictable reduction of the multisyllabic Kokoraleis but also the name of a famous cartoon character, “Koko the Clown” from Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series (1918–1929), and “Koko the Killer Clown,” a surly dwarf who performs at Coney Island. Edward Spreitzer neither knew Gacy nor had a clownish nickname, but he did have a “big red fuzzy bush” of hair, “which stood up in all directions and he had clown lips.” One detective thought he looked like the children’s show marionette Howdy Doody, while the other was “immediately reminded of Bozo the Clown.”44
Associates, nicknames, and appearances do not make the Chicago Rippers a physical embodiment of clowns-in-vans, but their cannibalism calls attention to the fear of being eaten that is a fundamental part of the clowns’ origins.
Black Blood
Some Atlantans apparently believed that scientists were turning the blood of black children into interferon, the way earlier generations thought that blacks were kidnapped, cut up, and used to manufacture castor oil. Though cadavers were regularly stolen for anatomy classes, both modern and traditional night doctor legends can be understood from another perspective; as cannibalism described in terms of medicine. “Butchering” then becomes “dissection” and instead of victims being eaten as meat, they are reduced to the more palatable and presentable form of drugs. These stories represent an unexpected result of the slave trade; the “persistence of African beliefs that whites are man-eaters.”45
For hundreds of years, European and later American merchants sailed along the west coast of Africa buying vast numbers of slaves for transportation across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. The physical conditions were horrific, but in addition to heat, filth, disease, and overcrowding were psychological terrors for Africans who had never seen the ocean or a ship, and thought white sailors were evil spirits. Rumors had spread
from Senegambia to Angola that the slavers, whose appetite for human cargo had become prodigious, were insatiable cannibals . . . The white man’s cannibalism explained his hunger for slaves and hence the trade.46
An eighteenth-century Dutch handbook advised traders to “assure the slaves . . . that they should not be afraid; that white people were not cannibals . . . ,” but sailors would threaten to devour the captives, who interpreted the forced feedings and endless lying in chains as preparation for slaughter.47
For African slaves, the Middle Passage meant being chained into an incomprehensible conveyance and carried away as food for supernatural white-faced cannibals in bizarre clothing. The clowns-in-vans appear to be a stylized history of this ordeal, just as the Pied Piper of Hamelin seems based on the Children’s Crusade.
Clowns, however, do not just represent night doctors or slave traders but the white race in general, which, according to folklore, needs black blood to live. Their unnatural pallor suggests coldness and death, while red mouths and noses are the gore-smeared faces of predators feeding on black victims—a belief born in Africa.
For example, consider a legend from Tanzania that was “apparently quite popular during World War II”:
A victim [African] would be rendered unconscious and then hung head down in order to let the blood from the slit jugular drain into a bucket. The fluid was then transported by a fire engine to an urban hospital, where it was converted into red capsules. These pills were taken on a regular basis by Europeans who . . . needed these potations to stay alive in Africa.48
Phantom Clowns
Americans have been experiencing phantom panics since at least 1692, when spectral raiders menaced outlying farms at the outskirts of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since then, there have been mysterious stabbers, snipers, gassers, wild men, and “Springheeled Jacks” (tall, thin figures that make superhuman leaps). Some of these have been reported for hundreds of years, but clowns-in-vans are a recent phenomenon, the result of a hypothetical union between black folklore and traditional clowns. The result was a modern form of phantom that spread rapidly, adapted to local conditions, and produced a number of different forms (e.g., the Chelsea Smilers).
Outbreaks of clown hysteria also provided an unusual complement to what was happening in popular culture, where the dark side of clowns, the “there’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight” aspect, has assumed so much importance that the “evil clown” is one of the representative figures of contemporary horror.
Phantom clown panics still occur, but not on a nationwide scale. If they prove to be as durable as Springheeled Jack, and this theory of their origin is accurate, then Americans for generations to come will be haunted by grotesque, grease-painted, cannibal ghosts of the Middle Passage.
The Blood Gospel
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The rumors circulating in Kansas City, Missouri, about a strange sect operating at the eastern part of the city had been dismissed as too fantastic to be true. At the beginning of 1890, William O. Huckett, secretary of the Humane Society, received a letter, however, that suggested it was time to investigate.
Mr. Huckett: There is somethin I think ought to be called to your attenshun at once which I think is bad for a civilized community. their is John Wrinkle and his 2 children He has been sick and he is crazy on religion. his little Minnie is 13 years old and his boy John is 11. Wrinkle has hearn that peo
ple drink blod at the sloughter houses for their health an he said he believed in the bible that preached that the well should make sacrifises for the sick.
He did blead his little boy and girl until they are recks and he did drink the blod. It has leaked out an unless something is done by you the neighbors will take the matter in their own hand and that quick too. He lives in a little piece of land near the new city limits. yours respectfully GEORGE WEST1
Secretary Huckett informed the chief of police, Thomas Speers, and a Humane Society officer named Marran was dispatched to the home of John Wrinkle, where he found
two emaciated children. On the bed lay Wrinkle, who was apparently in the last stages of consumption. When questioned about drinking the blood of the children he strenuously denied having done so. The children also denied it. Their bloodless appearance, however, excited the suspicion of the officer and he compelled them to show their arms. The limbs were in a terrible condition, being covered with scars inside of the elbow joint, showing plainly the effects of the bleeding. When confronted with the evidence of the truth of the accusation, Wrinkle acknowledged that he had availed himself of the opportunity, and asserted that the children had willingly given their blood to restore him to health.2
No crime had been committed, but Minnie and John were placed in the Children’s Home, while the moribund Wrinkle could not be moved. The blood drinking that appalled Mr. Wrinkle’s neighbors would not end with his approaching death, though, for he was just one of Silas Wilcox’s followers.
The Samaritans
Nothing is known about Silas Wilcox before his arrival in Kansas City in 1888 or 1889, but he was a traveling preacher who put great emphasis on helping the sick and interpreted Leviticus 17:11 (KJV), “For the life of the flesh is in the blood,” to mean that blood cures disease. His teachings attracted around twenty believers who were called “the Samaritans” and visited slaughterhouses to drink “the blood of the freshly killed beeves.”3 At some point, however, Wilcox decided that it would be better if, instead of livestock, they drank each other’s blood.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 18
